You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

"And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virture-- liking what you've got to do. All condtioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!

"Consider the matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder kills only the individual-- and after all, wha is an individual? ". . . ." We can make a new one with the greatest of ease-- as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."

"I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. WHy was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Becuase he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't htink of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases."

"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."

"An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-moron work-- go mad or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized-- but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, fo rth egood reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting he's still inside a bottle-- an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course," the Controller meditatively continued, goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined to a narrower space."

Unless one has been caught up in a war and experienced the terror that comes of knowing that thousands of heavily armed individuals are bent on one's annihilation, it is hard to realize that most violence is not primarily motivated by evil, greed, lust, ideology, or agresssion. Stranges as it may seem, most violence is defensive. it is notivated by the fear that if one does not kill one ill be killed. Either by the enemy or by one's own superiors. Against this constant anxiety, and the acute sense of fear and vulnerabilty that accompanies it, one conjures an illusion of power-- torching buildings, shooting unarmed civilians, firing rocket grentades, smoking cannabis, shouting ordrs, changing slogans, seeing oneself as Rambo, taunting, torturing, and abusing the individuals one has taken captive. But all this display of might-- this weaponry, thse medicines and amulets, this noise, these incantations, both political and magical, these Hollywood images, these drug-induced fuges, these rituals of brotherhood and solidarity -- simply reveal the depth of oen's own impotence and fear. This is Hannah Arendt's great insight-- that while military power consolidates itself in numbers, and in coordinated, automatic forms of mass movement, terrorism seeks power in implements, and is driven not by might but by its absence. And so it is that in the auto-da-fe, with explosions and bomb blasts, fire, noise, and mayhem, that the terrorist, like a child, finds his apotheosis, achieving the recognition, presence, voice and potency he has been denied in the real world.